The Sound of the Trees (37 page)

The boy listened listlessly and regarded the numbers on the gauges with an apprehensive eye, all the while remembering back to the nights of riding in his father's truck, how he would bury his head deep in the upholstery of the backseat while his father swerved down the black country roads. And how every once in a while he would crane his neck up and gaze upon the speedometer for which he did not know the purpose of the ascending needle but took it to show the rise of blood in his father's face and the endlessly increasing and immense silence of his mother who sat rigid in the front seat.

It seems too much, he said.

Charlie Ford gave a sigh. You know it ain't too much, he said. Most people your age been drivin a number of years and I don't believe half of em as smart as you. Now get over here.

Ford got out and crossed the headlights where his face took an obscene and warped illumination. When he got to the passenger side the boy slid himself behind the wheel and ran his fingers over the dash. He looked down at the heavy square pedals. Charlie Ford hopped into the passenger seat and turned off the truck and motioned for the boy to start it again.

It was two hours counting before Charlie Ford was convinced the boy could drive. He took him back and forth down the gravel path, letting him crank it and drive out on the open road and swing into reverse and bring the truck around again.

When the boy finally got down from the truck he crouched in the grass and looked to where his horse stood grazing, holding for a long moment the dark swatch of the mare's mane in the quiver of his eye.

Charlie Ford led the boy over to the barn where he served up coffee. He asked the boy where he would stay the night and the boy told him he planned to stay at the inn on the plaza to be close and ready. Best make yourself quiet as a cat, was all Ford said. Then for a while he asked the boy questions about what he should do on a road like this or that until finally the boy said he couldn't talk about it anymore and that he'd take the truck that night and leave his horse and wasn't that enough to satisfy him.

I could come with you, Charlie Ford said.

The boy shook his head at his coffee.

I figured you'd say that. Thank you, but I reckon it ought to be just me.

Charlie Ford managed a smile. And I figured you'd say that, he said.

They drank coffee with the darkness now full in the valley, and after a while the boy got up and brought down his saddlebags from his horse and piled all the things he had promised the rancher onto the barn floor. He looked down at the pile and almost began to take it up again, but at last he turned and spat and shook his head and said, It's all yours.

Charlie Ford looked uncertainly over the ragged heap of leather and metal and cloth, but he thanked the boy kindly and told him he best be getting down the road.

In the cool night air he walked the boy out to the truck again with only the sound of their boots in the grass. When the boy climbed in and got the motor cranked Charlie Ford leaned into the open window and told him again how he had to be strong no matter what happened. Lastly he told the boy that he admired him for what he was doing and that he was right, he would have done the same for his wife, and that if he had had a son of his own, he'd of hoped he would come out just like him.

To this the boy lowered his head and frowned at his lap, saying if he had had a father half as fine as him, but then stopped and nodded at his feet, saying finally that he would see him in the afternoon and to have the horses ready.

T
WENTY-TWO

IN THE WAN light of the quarter moon the boy motored the truck to the back of the inn and parked it askew to the proprietor's barn. He shut off the engine and the lights and came down with his hat in one hand and his rucksack with the new clothes in the other. A fine mist had risen up from the damp earth to slide silently across the grass, and it settled around the boy's ankles as he walked to the barn.

The proprietor's horse was tending to her stall in near darkness, shuffling her hindquarters through the soiled hay beneath her. When the boy came forward she looked up. He set down his rucksack and took her lean jaw in his hand. Even without the light he could see the sick hunger in her eyes. Her unclipped feet were sodden with manure. He stroked her and went across the cold dirt of the barn floor and brought back a tin bowl of water from the spigot and set it before her.

He sat against the stall gate and listened to the countryside and smoked. He sat for nearly an hour and he seldom moved. Listening and smoking and remembering those sounds and smells that he once knew every day. The quiet insistence of the night and the wilderness was somehow comforting, with the raw smell of the horses and hay and worn-down leather rising above it all. After he rose and fondled the horse's head, he flicked away the stub of his cigarette and went walking to the inn.

The innkeeper came rubbing his eyes from the door behind the counter after the third ring of the bell. He squinted at the boy and twisted the ends of his glasses behind his ears and sighed.

Time at last to come of age? he said. Find yourself whichever one you like. Go on up there. Them girls are always eager for a virgin. Always titterin on about you anyways. Not that I could rightly see why. Lookin at you don't seem to do nobody no favors. He smirked at the boy and opened the shabby ledger and thumbed through the loose sheets of paper. I can't read this, he said. I'll just go on and call Janis down here. First poke in the weeds don't make no difference but for a hole.

I ain't interested in no Janis, the boy said. I ain't here for none of that. I need a room.

The proprietor looked up from his ledger.

Ah, he said after a moment. He squinted at the boy cunningly. Ain't you in some trouble with the mayor? Something about tomorrow's show, ain't it?

Tomorrow's what?

The hangin, boy. The goddamn show.

The boy only looked down at his hands. Right, he said. The show.

Far as I've heard you should be gone from here, the innkeeper said cheerfully. The fact you're still hangin around is probably worth a good piece to the mayor I'm sure.

The boy stared at the man awhile. Then he leaned down to the floor and produced a twenty-dollar bill from his boot heel and set it on the counter. The innkeeper smiled at the money and picked it up and pushed it into his shirt pocket. I'd say that's about right, he said. He smiled again. Nothin personal, he said. You understand.

The boy sidled up to the counter and rested his fists upon it. You understand you got a horse out back there?

The innkeeper stayed studying the tablet for a room. Yeah, he said absently, I know it.

I was just wonderin if you remembered. Cause it seems it might be the other way around.

The innkeeper raised his head from the ledger and handed him a key. Room's on the front right, he said. Upstairs.

The boy tossed a plug of bills onto the counter. And that's for the room, he said. Maybe you ought to think about usin some of it on that horse instead of on women that ain't your wife.

The proprietor slammed his palms down on the counter. Damnation, he said. I can't even believe this. You tryin to tell me in one sentence you know more about horses and women than I do? You little son of a bitch.

I ain't talkin about women or horses. I don't know what to tell you about them. What I'm talkin about is quittin, that's all.

The innkeeper glared at the boy a moment longer, then slammed the ledger shut and ripped down the glasses from his face and slung them on the counter and walked off for the door.

Well thank God for that, he said.

It was the same room he had been given when he first arrived in town. He closed the door behind him and turned the knob on the lamp. The room swelled with a soft yellow glow. The bedcovers were drawn tight and the tablets and pencils on the side desk were even to the thumb. He placed his rucksack on the footstool at the base of the bed and sat down and pulled off his boots. Then he dragged the chair to the window and looked down on the plaza.

His eyes immediately fell on what he had not seen before, the skeletal structure of the hanging platform. There were no lights around the plaza that evening but he could see it in the moon glow. He watched it for a long time, the hard firm beams of it, the long and rigid shadows it cast upon the earth.

Some time later, long into the night, his eyes opened to the sound of someone walking beneath the window. He righted himself in the chair he had slumped over in and saw the shape of a boot behind the hanging posts. He saw it alone and then stepping with its twin to eclipse the moonlight on the road, then he saw them turn and walk and slowly turn again. When the boots stopped and turned a third time, in profile against the pale blue light, he recognized the beard of the mayor.

The mayor looked up at the wooden beams, then higher up into the sky, then at his feet. He walked again and stopped and turned and did the same pace over again. He pulled at his beard and took down his glasses from his face and wiped them on his shirtsleeve. The boy leaned forward and scrambled for his boots and pulled them on but before he rose again the mayor was walking swiftly away. The boy pressed his face to the window and looked out in quiet desperation to where the mayor's shadow soon vanished and the moon fell behind the clouds and darkness settled once again to shape in a darker hue the gallows below.

*   *   *

He rose before dawn and walked down the cold floor of the hallway toward the bathroom with the faint moaning of whores already beginning or still finishing from the night before. He closed the door, a mournful click, and filled the tub with hot water. He stripped and stepped into the tub and shaved and washed himself and stepped once more from the water and out of the dark steamed room with a towel clinging to his sunken hips.

He dressed in his newly purchased clothes and scrubbed the mud from his boots and sat on the edge of the bed and pulled them on. He combed back his hair with his hands and situated the new hat on his head, moving it this way and that until it sat straight. He rubbed his face and turned his hat around once more and buttoned his shirt to the middle of his chest and folded the sleeve cuffs over his forearms. Then he stood and crossed the room and regarded himself in the gilded mirror.

He could have been a young man calling on his sweetheart. Or a soldier returned from war and on his way to a dinner where his family had gathered to receive his arrival. Or just a regular boy his age, dressed for the first day of his job at an office in town where they would pay for his schooling and room and board until he found a wife and a place for them to live. He pulled the brim of his hat lower still and he knew that he could have been a number of things but he knew also that he was none of them and that he never would be.

He turned away from the mirror and went to the window and looked out. No one was walking the street. There was no visible sun nor moon and the town lay in a light so flat it seemed no light at all. He withdrew the knife from his rucksack and slid it in the small scabbard he'd tied to his leg just under the cuff of his boot. Then he took out the old man's pistol. He held it in his hands and stared at it a long time.

*   *   *

When he came to Old 17 he veered the truck into a low ditch and cut off the engine. The cottonwoods along the bank of the road and out toward the Englishman's house were thin and unknitted by winter's coming but packed densely together, densely enough to cover his approach.

He walked swiftly along the stream, a quarter mile away from the road. The sun made its first clean rise in the east, dashing red coins of light upon the trickling water he stepped through. He stumbled along the rocks and swathed through the brush with a low swishing sound when he emerged from the stream.

After about a half an hour he stopped and listened. Voices rose from the distant road. He could tell they were at their card games already, shouting and drinking and calling for queens and diamonds.

When he cleared out from the cottonwoods almost an hour later, he could see the back of the Englishman's house cloistered by the light of the cold sun. He looked up and estimated it was nearly seven o'clock, five hours before the girl would be led from the prison house to the willow tree.

He walked along some flattened logs and down into the soft earth and shuttled through an open field toward a copse of box elders rising dark and feathered behind the house. There he found a wide trunk of a tree that had been cut down and he glanced around for any sign of the Ralstons and finally sat. He undid his shirt pocket and rustled out a cigarette with his chilled and shaking fingers and lit it and began his watch.

Not long after, he saw some of the guards emerge at the edges of the front yard. Then they turned and disappeared again. There were two of them from what he could make out and he smoked and watched them as the sun mounted a sky now loaded with a heavy basket of cloud. They would come into his view, then turn and fall toward the house again in slow repetition. He tugged his jacket around his neck and blew steady streams of smoke at his feet. He knew the Englishman would come out sometime. He waited. His gun was tucked to his side and after a while he took it from his belt and ran his fingers over the steel barrel, pointing it and bringing it down and flipping it on the ground by his side. He lit another cigarette and inspected the yard.

Along the northern edge of the property stood a jagged row of acacia which appeared at some point to have been subject to a firestorm. The thin trunks of the trees corded one another and their blackened limbs lay sunken and tangled. They stretched out all the way past the water well behind the house and as he waited he listened to the wind tearing through the old branches.

An hour of waiting soon became two and then three. The two men in the front of the house kept up their pacing all morning long, pausing only to exchange a few words or pass cigarettes. They had long-barreled rifles slung over their shoulders and they held the stocks in the cups of their hands.